The pride of this release is one amazing new feature – shape morphing.

Shape morphing, as the name suggests, allows you to morph one shape into another one. Perhaps you’ve seen the amazing UI of Persona 5 which by itself is as impressive as some entire games out there:

Notice the blue quadrilateral over the currently selected menu item – the animation of its vertices is exactly a shape morph.

Shape morphs are impressive in that most other ways to animate objects in UI systems is limited to animating colors and positions of the object itself whereas this allows you to animate per-vertex and even – per shape. You aren’t just limited to moving points around – you can have a rectangle become a circle become a tiger become really anything. Here are some examples of shape morphing running in Hummingbird:

(How about a round of applause for the devs who implemented the feature?)

Now the big question is – how do you specify shape morphs? We’ve extended the SVG format to support them and although in theory you can add them to existing SVG files, in practice it makes more sense to use our Adobe Animate Exporter to generate them automatically. Stay tuned for its next version that will allow you to do exactly that.

Quantity * Quality

Instead of adding a handful of big features, this release adds a bunch of minor enhancements, a full list of which you can enjoy in the changelog. I am just going to show you one of them – the ability to apply different X and Y blurs to an element.

Presto, motion blur!

Finally, let me give you a small preview for the upcoming 1.13 and 1.14. We are in the process of adding a couple of big new things to Hummingbird. For example, some massive optimizations of our rendering pipeline that will reduce the number of draw calls by an order of magnitude. We are also adding VIDEO playback support! We heard your feedback about all the effects you want to achieve with it and soon enough you’ll be able to implement them all. Cinematics? Check. Particle effects? Check. Prerendered animated avatars? Check.

Stay tuned for our upcoming releases and if you want to be the first one to hear about them, make sure to follow me or Coherent Labs.